Rubbing me the wrong way.

For many years I dreamed about a professional massage. Oh, I’ve had a few amateur sessions – lackluster performances, really – reluctantly carried out by girlfriends whom I would badger until they eventually gave in. They’d go through the motions but you could usually tell their hearts weren’t really in it.

When I got married, I figured that a job of one’s wife was to put her hands to good use. Unfortunately, I would learn that this “use” more often than not tended to involve cooking, cleaning, and gesticulating theatrically about the size of the mess I’d left in the kitchen; noble endeavors, you could argue, but not as far as my taut trapezius was concerned. A professional masseuse was what I needed, a person not only skilled in the art of bodily delights but who wouldn’t start complaining after a mere five minutes.

For her birthday, Carolina received a gift certificate to Bella Sante, a spa on Newbury Street, and I immediately invited myself along. Swanky spas on Newbury are neither cheap nor in my comfort zone, but this was my one chance to be rubbed down by an expert and I wasn’t about to miss it. I began my preparation for the big day by diligently harassing Carolina until she agreed to request a woman for my massage. Not necessarily because this is the one circumstance in life in which it’s socially permissible for some lady to douse her hands in oil and then work them all over somebody else’s husband, but because I strenuously object to having beefy man mitts do so. Call me homophobic, but, well, there it is.

The fun started when we stepped in. I was feeling a little on edge, this being my first expedition to a predictably steeped-in-estrogen spa, engendering a feeling not unlike the proverbial bull in a china shop. I was hoping to cling to Carolina for support throughout the ordeal, she being the alpha female you need when navigating unfamiliar terrain. While I like to think of myself as the pants-wearer in our family, it’s totally Carolina. She’s the one who makes all my merchandise returns, wrangles with the Verizon people, deals with our landlord, and, should I mention that the coffee is getting low, has a pound of Starbucks waiting by sundown. Basically, she does most of the crummy jobs I prefer get accomplished without my involvement.

Unfortunately, my plan was shot when we were immediately separated, my wife shown to the women’s locker room while I was escorted by an extremely effeminate male to the men’s room. It was not unlike the first day of kindergarten and I was being pried away from my mom.

“There’s a robe, shorts, and slippers in your locker,” he sort of murmured, then commanded, “Take everything off and then meet me back out in the lobby.”

“Okay… but wait… so I take everything off now?”

“Yeah!”

“And then… meet you in the lobby… out there?”

“Yeah!”

I’m not saying the gentleman was turned on by the idea of me in the nude or anything, but he definitely seemed gung-ho about this whole disrobing business. And yet, I all but begged him not to leave me. Managing myself in a spa is not a condition I am in any way practiced in.

Of course, of course there were no shorts to be found in my locker, or in any of the others that I desperately ransacked, leaving me without a fairly important component of my ensemble. Oh, man... So what did spa etiquette dictate in this little quandary? Was I supposed to sift through the dirty laundry bin and retrieve a soiled pair? Forget about them altogether? Scream for help?

Think, damn it. Think…

Realizing I was taking too long to emerge from the locker room, I simply left my cargo shorts on, donned the robe, and nervously made my way out into the lobby. The attendants at the front desk all had a good laugh and I was sent back into the locker room to remove my cargos.

“But there were no other shorts in there,” I protested.

“Then wear your own,” the womanly guy said.

But I was wearing my own. “But not these ones?” I asked, noticing my voice had become high and flighty.

They all chuckled again, and I felt my face grow hot. I was reminded of Arnold Swarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop when the kids are enamored with the ferret and he says, all stressed out, “We are having fun now.” What exactly was so funny? I had the distinct impression I was missing something intended to be obvious, but what? Did they think I’d brought another pair of shorts just for the occasion?

“You can wear your boxers in you want,” womanly guy told me with a good-natured twinkle in his eye.

If I wanted? What were my alternatives? What I wanted was to tell him that I don’t wear boxers, but that would undoubtedly send the front desk into bellows of laughter and force me to make a beeline for the exit. I wasn’t trying to cause trouble, I just wanted to know what to do. Now they had me pegged as an imbecile.

“It’s nice in here,” I blurted out, as if that would somehow fix things.

Removing the cargo shorts, I wrapped the robe – a silky, kimono-type thing – around me with a triple-knot and timidly proceeded back into the lobby where fully dressed people were milling about. It’s funny the things you think about while parading around among clothed strangers while wearing a small silky robe and not much else. The probability of surviving a leap from the nearest window comes to mind.

Thankfully I was able to rejoin Carolina in the lounge, where a group made up entirely of women quietly sipped organic beverages and listened to New Age music while stealing curious peeks at the big man in the small robe. I kept trying to make conversation with Carolina but apparently banter is frowned upon, as my efforts were repeatedly brushed off.

“But I’m bored and scared,” I whined. “I want to talk.”

She laughed and went back to her magazine; I quietly sulked, feeling beads of sweat trickle down from my armpits and a cool breeze whisk up my kimono. I wondered, not for the first time, if I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.

After a while our masseur and masseuse emerged – a big bald man and an attractive blonde, respectively. For a brief moment I was terrified that there’d been an oversight, some clerical error, and the strapping bald man would say, “Okay, Marc!” and I, being too non-confrontational to do anything about it, would grudgingly acquiesce to his meaty demands.

So I was immensely relieved when the woman called my name and led me to a small, dimly lit room and instructed me to take off my robe and then climb under the sheet on the massage table while the masseuse, named Maria, waited outside. The dimensions of the small room, long table, and big me coupled with the poor lighting were all but logistically unfeasible, and at one point I lost my balance, bumped into the table and crashed into the door. Idiot. I can’t imagine what Maria must have thought when that thunderous commotion occurred.

Lying facedown on the table, I was finally beginning to relax and enjoy the massage when I smelled something funky. At first I thought it was the massage oil but soon realized it was Maria’s feet.

The objectionable odor, which wafted up through the hole in the headrest, entered directly into my nostrils. In Maria’s defense it was at least 95 degrees on Saturday, but still, the last thing you want piped into your stationary face during a massage is someone’s inescapable foot stench.

Can't... breathe...

When I wasn’t suffocated by smelly feet – or having mine tickled by Maria (I really had to gnash on my lip to keep from giggling and jerking my foot away when she did the foot-tickling) – the massage was pretty good. Nothing transcendent, but top-notch, the kind of thing you could get used to very quickly did it not set you back rent money.

Afterward, back in the locker room, I decided to take a quick shower when I came face-to-face with a brawny black guy who had also just finished with his massage – which was conducted, I had noticed, by a masseur.

“Which way are you going?” he asked, blocking the only shower stall.

“Uh…”

“Did you want to go in the shower?”

Together? I thought nervously. Is this type of behavior standard for post-spa treatments? Instead I urged, “You go ahead.”

A while later, back outside and seated on the patio at Charlie’s, I ignored Maria’s advice to drink lots of water so to flush toxins out of my body and instead uploaded even more by way of the ginger mojito, musing to Carolina between sips, “We should do this more often.”